P2P: From Internet Scourge to Savior

Every few years, someone predicts the imminent collapse of the Internet. Bob Metcalfe–Ethernet inventor, 3Com founder, and Technology Review patron–famously said at a 1995 Web conference that he would eat his words from a pessimistic Infoworld column if the Web didn’t disappear within a year under the strain of traffic overloads and other problems. In April 1997, Metcalfe contritely drank a milkshake containing the torn-up bits of his column. In 2004, Helsinki University of Technology professor Hannu Kari said spam and viruses would kill off the Internet by 2006. The fact that you’re looking at this website now means Kari was wrong.

The point is that even the sharpest innovators and entrepreneurs have often had a hard time seeing how the next hurdle in the Internet’s growth would be overcome–only to be surprised by some new resource, technology, or business idea that emerges in the nick of time. (In both 1996-97 and 2005-2006, Internet service providers responded in part by adding more bandwidth to their networks.)

But will that pattern hold out forever? The dam-breaking success of YouTube and Apple’s iTunes Video Store–neither of which existed prior to 2005–has unleashed a huge new flow of digital video on the Internet, and many consumers now spend hours a day streaming or downloading everything from home movies to live sports and prime-time TV series. Because video files are so large compared with the Web pages and e-mail messages that used to dominate Internet traffic, backbone lines are under strain, and backbone operators such as AT&T and Verizon and Internet service providers such as Comcast are facing new costs they can’t easily recoup, given the flat-rate pricing of most consumer broadband Internet access plans.

Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies broadband networks, says that "2006 will be remembered as the year of Internet video. Consumers have shown that they basically want unlimited access to the content owners’ video. But what if the entire Internet gets swamped in video traffic?"